How To Generate A List Of Files Contained in a Windows Folder

Contributor(s): Staff
With a Mac it's easy to copy a list of files in a folder to a text document but difficult on Windows. Here is a way to do it.

You must first summon your DOS command prompt (Start Menu -> Run, enter "cmd", then hit return. Your DOS command prompt should then materialize.). In the DOS command prompt, navigate (by using "cd C:foldernamefoldername etc until you are there) to the level that contains the folder in question (do not navigate *into that folder); then type the name of the folder for whose contents you want to generate a file list, followed by a ">", then enter a name for the file to be created with the name of every file in the folder in question.

So in this case we take the contents of a hypothetical folder "temp", which in this case is in the top level of the C drive, and write it to a file called "filelist.txt". Here's how:

dir C:temp > C:filelist.txt

It's that simple. This is what you will then find as the contents of filelist.txt (i.e. these are the names of the files in our hypothetical folder "temp"):